Blair, Blears and ting
I switched on the TV a couple of days ago and caught a few seconds of Tony Blair’s foreign policy speech… the one delivered in Los Angeles. I’d missed the first third of it, but planned to listen to the rest. Unfortunately the very first thing I heard him say was how militant Islam “resembles in many ways early revolutionary Communism”. At that moment I weighed up the cost of a new television against my desire to watch Blair deliver a speech, and went for a walk instead.
You couldn’t make it up. Blair raising the spectre of Reds Under The Beds during a policy speech in America…? I know I say this all the time, but our political leaders are all turning into minor characters in a Thomas Pynchon novel. Or maybe it’s the ghost of Hunter S. Thompson fucking with our heads. Take thanatoid Ortho Bob from Pynchon’s Vineland for instance. I don’t know exactly why, but when I read this description I just can’t help but think of Dubya Bush…
Ortho Bob came lurching over, looking as awful as the night he must have spent, wanting to talk some more about his case. He had been damaged in Vietnam, in more than one way, from the list of which he always carefully – though it might only have been superstitiously – excluded death. There were items enough on his get-even agenda, relief for none of which was available through regular channels.
Ortho Bob isn’t Bush… well, not directly anyways… but that last line completely sums up how I feel whenever I see Dubya. He’s got the same look in his eyes that Ortho Bob has as he lurches across the Zero Inn to Takeshi’s table.
Political funding
To other things… I notice over at Justin’s place an issue has arisen which finds me, unusually, in complete disagreement with the boy. No, not that Hazel Blears must be stopped. As a general rule, who could argue with that? It’s just that – in one of those monkeys and typewriters moments – Blears is actually backing a sound principle in this case.
Blears view, as I see it, is that political parties should be funded through the public purse (aside: I’ve got my media player on shuffle and Taxman by The Beatles has just this minute come on). And while I do completely see Justin’s points when he decries such an idea, I nonetheless believe that public funding is the lesser of evils.
Now, before I explain why, could I just put in the standard disclaimer about how I actually don’t believe representative democracy is a good way to run things in the first place, and how if I were made God Emperor there’d be some pretty damn radical restructuring, and the phrase Anarcho-Syndicalist Utopia would enter the common lexicon. So yeah, this is very much an exercise in deckchair rearrangement as far as I’m concerned.
Here’s the thing… we clearly live in an era where parties with better funding do better in elections. I’ll not go into my standard rant about how badly our poor ol’ apebrain deals with mass media advertising, but I’m assuming it’s an uncontroversial point that high levels of funding relative to your opponents gives an advantage in a modern election. And this advantage could very well be a decisive one in close contests.
The trouble is; that’s profoundly undemocratic. Which is a bit crap if your aim is to run things democratically. It all but forces political parties to pander to the business community and the wealthy. There may be a lot more of the poor, but they tend not to set aside a large slice of the household budget for political donations. Maybe back in the days of mass unionisation… but harking back to a past golden age is the job of The Right, so let’s not kid ourselves, eh?
If we place a political party or an independent politician in the position of relying upon donations for their political survival, we cannot blame them for seeking out the biggest donations. And while we may despair that parties seem to represent those who finance them above those who vote for them, we are surely not surprised about it. How on earth could it turn out otherwise given what we all know about the average human capacity to resist temptation?
On the other hand, if you deny all funding to politicians except a ration from the public purse based upon the number of votes they receive… they’ll still end up representing the people who pay for their campaigns, but now those people are their voters.
Yes, this is a very very simple sketch… safeguards would have to be introduced to prevent the entrenchment of power (because that’s not already happening, right?) and the active exclusion of smaller parties. There’s also the ethical dilemma of having extremist parties being funded by the public, no matter how “democratic” the formula that calculates the level of funding.
Still, I see it as self-evidently more democratic than the current system which forces politicians to choose between representing those who vote for them and those who pay for them. Just so we’re clear though… down with democracy! It’s a godawful way to run a civilisation in decline.
Rob Newman’s History of Oil & Ting
Speaking of civilisations in decline, via Gyrus at Dreamflesh comes a link to Rob Newman’s vaudevillesque political screed “History of Oil”. It’s both funny and informative. I’d heard a radio broadcast of it before, but it’s greatly enhanced by the visuals. Watch it at Google Video.
Oh yeah, a couple of other links. Ken MacLeod has returned after a prolonged break with a hard-hitting piece on the Israel-Lebanon conflict. Well worth a read. Meanwhile over at David Byrne’s journal he talks about US Christian fundamentalism in terms usually used to discuss militant Islam. I’ll bet he gets some interesting hate mail.
Jim,
allocating funding on the basis of votes might be a tad conservative. Better to offer people the opportunity to vote for one party and fund another, perhaps – I might really not want the Tories to win in my seat, for example, and so vote Labour or Lib Dem or something, but want to give money to the Greens, say, so as to try and make them more prominent.
August 3rd, 2006 | 2:22pm
by Rob
Are you calling me “conservative”? I’ve kicked people for less!
Mind you, there is something to what you say. I’m sure the detailed mechanics of the system could be greatly refined from my simple sketch. Although I do feel that the simpler the link between voting intentions and funding, the more fundamentally democratic the system would be.
August 3rd, 2006 | 2:29pm
by Jim
I’m not sure about “the simpler the link between voting intentions and funding, the more fundamentally democratic the system would be”. Say there’s a certain level of funding a political party has to have to get off the ground, which seems reasonably plausible. By tying funding to voting, you’d be denying them any real opportunity to compete. That would be undemocratic, I’d have thought.
August 3rd, 2006 | 3:39pm
by Rob
Rob, that’s exactly the point I was making (albeit unclearly) when I suggested that “safeguards would have to be introduced to prevent […] the active exclusion of smaller parties”.
There’s a question of whether some kind of “minimum funding” could be introduced. Though of course that system runs the risk of having the taxpayer fund every lunatic with an axe to grind.
My own preferred option would be a system whereby a party which polled less than a certain number of votes at the previous election could solicit direct funding from its members. Once they gain the minimum amount of public support necessary to receive from the taxpayer that “certain level of funding a political party has to have to get off the ground”, then they must cease all other forms of fundraising.
This allows a democratic / level- playing field for all established parties, but does not exclude pressure groups from raising the money to stand in elections and ultimately establish themselves within the political system should they attract enough votes.
August 3rd, 2006 | 3:53pm
by Jim
PS: I completely accept that this may not work too well in an electoral system which encourages tactical voting to the extent that the UK first-past-the-post system does. But I’m kind of assuming that any serious attempts to make party funding more democratic would be accompanied by a more representative electoral system.
PPS: Down with democracy! (Just in case anyone forgets)
August 3rd, 2006 | 4:01pm
by Jim
Hmmm. It still doesn’t really address the gap between voter and party though. By giving the larger parties a steady stream of public money you remove their incentive to engage with grassroots activists who, in days of yore, helped to formulate policy. Where’s the nuanced expression other than another cross in another box? Where’s the dialogue?
I think it would solve problems with our system enormously by giving people a real voice rather than just the say-so in who gets a nominal three quid. And that means politicians getting out there and kissing some serious booty.
I’m also pretty sure that the proposals doing the rounds right now still allow for donations upto a capped level (£50,000 has been mentioned). So, instead of Mr Bigshot writing one cheque he sends ten in the names of friends and family (with a nod and a wink and his ermine robe size, obviously). Or am I missing something?
August 3rd, 2006 | 8:35pm
by Justin
I disagree Justin. As I was careful to point out above, “safeguards would have to be introduced to prevent the entrenchment of power…”
The funding formula would not be a direct relationship between number of voters and amount of money. The curve would be in the form of a linear exponential decay… think of the shape of the curve that expresses Typical Mass Uptake Profile for LDF Behaviour (here if you need to refresh your memory).
This would ensure that the rate at which parties could grow – financially speaking – would slow down as they got larger (with a sensible maximum as a limit). This form of funding model also has the advantage of compensating the smaller parties for their inevitable (and quite proper) lack of news media coverage (the more power you have the more media scrutiny you should be subjected to) by giving them a greater rate of financial growth.
All of this also depends utterly on it being made illegal for political parties to accept any other form of funding (whether in the form of donations, loans or loopholes). Party accounts must be 100% transparent. And parties that fail to manage their finances will be allowed to die as publicly or quietly as they choose with strictly no option for loans or public bail-outs (if you can’t balance the books at a political party, you must accept you’re just not ready to run a nation yet).
As for your lament for the dwindling role of the grass roots activist, I honestly believe that phenomenon is compounded by our current system of party funding which places such power and influence into the hands of the rich and powerful, and makes it so expedient for politicians to ignore the masses.
Conversely, by informing parties that future levels of funding are dependent upon not merely garnering more votes than the next guy, but on maximising their turn-out… well, would there be any better way to force a reconnection with the grassroots?
August 4th, 2006 | 12:11am
by Jim
I can see Byrne’s point — some of us don’t see a real difference between U.S. Protestant christian fundamentalism and Islamic fundamentalism.
August 9th, 2006 | 3:28am
by L